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You do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meanings of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales.

Alan Watts

The past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.
ALAN WATTS

Abstraction Future Past Reality
The menu is not the meal.
ALAN WATTS

Food Meal Menu One Liner Philosophy
Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat’s entrails with horsehair.
ALAN WATTS

Music Play Violin
Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social enviornment.
ALAN WATTS

Attitude Aware Environment Immense Learning Mirror Ourselves People Power Social Teaching
A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.
ALAN WATTS

Inspirational Learning Scholar Student Try
Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.
ALAN WATTS

Conscious Glory Listen Magnificant Perceive Universe Witness
What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously.
ALAN WATTS

Convention Fatal Forget Serious Thinking
I owe my solitude to other people.
ALAN WATTS

One Liner Owe People Solitude
There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can’t be said.
ALAN WATTS

Adequate Poetry Talk Words
Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.
ALAN WATTS

Direction Move Philosophy Ready Stay
The frightened mind that runs away from everyday terrors meets the seeking mind that wants a better world.
ALAN WATTS

Frightened Meet Mind Run Seek Terror Want World
The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
ALAN WATTS

Change Dance Inspirational Join Move Reality Sense
Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.
ALAN WATTS

Difficult Fascinate Frustration Individual Intelligence Oneself Wisdom
Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot.
ALAN WATTS

One Liner Reality
A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.
ALAN WATTS

Anxiety Dead Each Other Equality Laugh Priest Religion Transformation
The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.
ALAN WATTS

Animal Compassion Love Play World

You do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meanings of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales.

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You do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meanings of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales.

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Popular Authors

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